Of Kings & Fools
by TheFoolishDivertimento
Summary: Whether this was fraternizing with the enemy at it's finest or not, Shiki will not break for a man like Nicole Premier. But, is this not breaking as it is?


He should have known that he was coming.

Right down to the way the dark spilled and rolled down his walls like ghosts to come creeping across the floorboards and scrape their jagged nails down his neck-right down to the sky tearing open and flooding this devil's nest of a city, the rain's crooning fingers drumming against the windows.

And especially by his inability to tangle himself in his white sheets and drown behind his closed eyes, in the realm of his own head. The covers clung to his bare torso and coiled around his legs like snakes, a covetousness that was increasingly frustrating as he had tossed, turned, tried to snare an hour's rest if nothing more. But no; the king can't rest after God knows how many clock turns of his invidiously passionate executions, of painting the streets red with scum out of the gutters.

Shiki had felt him, first and foremost; the smothering presence that filled the room like smoke and cyanide, knotted his chest and dropped dread into his gut. The steady drum of his pulse in his ears and rainwater descending to the hardwood floor was deafening, in all the silent and oppressive mood the intruder was carrying.

Time could have stopped and the world could have shattered, and he wouldn't have noticed, not for how tightly his chest seized and how his muscles froze into rigidity under the whiteness of his skin. The four walls shrunk in too tight, too close.

Nano was standing in the doorway, in all his wordlessness and cutting eyes digging up under Shiki's skin like white-hot needles.

Pitching a wild and feverish glare at the ghost of a man consequentially rewarded the raven with the shock of lividly bright, violet eyes, a luridly white face wet with rain and the darkened spill of gold that clutched at his cheeks.

Tight lipped, empty faced, and every bit as disquieting as Shiki remembered so dreadfully well.

The void of foreboding and thickening quiescence went untouched, ignorant to the sickening thirst Shiki was overwrought with, the thirst to seize the stretch of keen steel he treasured and bite it through Premier's throat and spray the walls in carmine.

Spray the walls with the morbid stamp of achievement he was striving to attain.

It seemed all too surreal, all too painless in the black-white pictures behind his eyelids.

And yet the stillness brooding about the room went undisturbed in spite of all his vehement and macabre passion bubbling in his chest. Or at least, it had gone undisturbed until a twitch of Premier's lips gave way to the chilling drone of his colourless voice.

"Power is absolute, said Il-Re."

What was the bastard going to spew for him this time? Shiki daren't save breath to muse for it, muscles springing into alertness and legs swinging over the edge of the bed. Fingers stretched, sought out the handle of his blood-bitten katana, his heart a war drum in his ears, and this was it, this was it, this was going to be the last nail in the coffin of the purple ghost-  
Except it wasn't.

Fluid as can be, ethereal and as phantom-like as his alias implied, the man had his wrist twisted and bent until the prized weapon clattered gracelessly, loudly to the floor, a knee lodged firmly below the ribs of the scarlet eyed man in one brutish slam.

"Your absolution runs high on the ghosts of dread in the back of your memories." Shiki barely hears him over the sound of his own back colliding with the stiff mattress of his bed, the disjointed, groaning shift of it as Nano moved to loom atop of his embarrassingly subdued form.

"Your power is but a stream that stems from the river of blackness and fear. Your absolution is crafted from the sin you hunger to extinguish." His voice is slow, hushed, whispering in a rasped monotone against Shiki's lips as the ghost dips his head just so.

Nano's hands then coil around his throat.

Shiki doesn't want to admit to the ringing panic that pistons through his veins the moment those wiry fingers squeeze on the column of pale skin. They squeeze hard, too hard, his body lurches against his will and all at once he smells the cloying breath of smoke and death coming to haunt him from the dark-dripping walls of his memories.

He claws like an animal at the relentless fingers crushing against his windpipe, the burning redness of his eyes wide in a fixated glare up-up into those depthless pools of nothing but impenetrable amaranthine. A darkness that tore back his skin and cut his soul open seam to seam until nothing is left unseen by those frighteningly cold eyes.

The raven kicks and jars his hips, mouth agape as the only comprehensible sound he can create is but a harsh and desperate wheeze grating against the tension on his throat. His writhing beneath this expressionless creature is all put to waste, muscles burning and mouth running dry as the terrifying sense of drowning comes to hammer into his heaving chest.

Was Nano going to clutch him like a noose until his heart stopped beating, stopped pumping that venomous hatred around his body?

That thought, was almost as terrifying as those that pulsed in his head the first time this man had laid eyes on him. The sheer emptiness in Nano's face was more than unsettling, as he effortlessly sucked the life out of the feared king of Toshima in spite of maddeningly uncoordinated kicks and unsuccessful punches, scratches, clawing.

The dark was drawing in around the corners of Shiki's fire-bright eyes, back arched in a bend off the rumpled and dishevelled sheets beneath him-sheets that very well may serve as his deathbed if Nano didn't relent, for even a second.

Dying cradled in white under the hands of sin. It was less idyllically picturesque than any death his could imagine.

However, Nano's grasp receded.

And at once, the man's back slumped into the caress of white covers and the groaning mattress and his chest pulsed with his wild, heaving gulps for air, the frenzied drumming of his heart against his ribs.

Nano on the other hand simply _watched_-impassively, almost jadedly, grazing a thumb in a careless stroke across Shiki's bottom lip.

He was going to kill this bastard.

Shiki's eyes were narrowed, burning up in contempt and the repulsively passionate hatred that curved and entwined around every fibre of him as he glowered up at that wickedly blank face.

"Weakness," He was talking again, scrutinizing him with those eyes as the king beneath him remained open mouthed in his attempt to swallow in enough air, and far from taking kindly to the intrusive fingers Nano prodded at his mouth with. "Is what made you."

He's dangerously close. Every word he says is a light and chilling gust of breath against his flushed face and open lips. The proximity is unsettling, unnerving, and Shiki doesn't like it one bit. His jaw snapped shut, tight, painfully tight on the unwanted fingers toying around his tongue.

His words are breathier than he'd hoped, but sharpened on a seasoned blade of rage and bitterness.

"You speak so conceitedly as if you know everything when you don't know a damned thing. You don't know me as well as you think. Don't croon to me with your damned idle judgements and philosophies." Shiki shoves with a renewed strain of power and vehemence at Nano's face, thrusting a foot savagely into the ghost's stomach.

"It will all amount to nothing when I am done with you and your accursed existence."

Nano barely shifts from his straddled position atop Shiki's hips, though he certainly twitches his lips in a wry, pale smirk.

"What are you_ sneering_ about?" The raven snarls at him, lip curled back and fingers knotted into the spill of Nano's hair. Did the bastard think this was funny? Did he think he was joking?

Did Nicole Premier take him- Il-Re-for a fool?

The man bent over him, placing the coldness of his lips to the welling marks on the pale throat of the king, a knee driving itself suddenly, unexpectedly between the open legs clad in leather.

"You surrendered to the demons in your own mind. You are a failure. Shiki." The words are as needle-like as his eyes, and as equitably as perturbing as the knee working and digging itself so brazenly against the man's clothed crotch.

No.

Oh,_ no_.

The noise the bubbles in his throat is too imbecilic to even dare let seep past his lips, and promptly, Shiki worries his teeth into his bottom lip as an uninvited surge of arousal rushes into his bloodstream. Nano is still painstakingly placing open mouthed kisses around his neck and its marred skin, still circling his knee into the now blatant hardness straining against his pants.

And under all the disgust, contempt, absolute hatred he bares for the man, he can't help but find a sliver of wanting him to do this.

Fuck.

He breathes in too sharp, hands rendered useless as they clutched at Nano's clothes, knotting the fabric between his fingers until the digits trembled and his knuckles turned white. He was burning, burning up right to the core of him, his resolve crumbling away to ash like the shed feathers of a bird.

This was not happening.

This couldn't be happening, god, it couldn't be happening. He couldn't be lying here being touched like this, by this fucking man and enjoying it, furthermore.

"What the_ fuck_ do you think you're doing! Premier, _stop_-!" Shiki snapped at him, angrily, lividly, but his voice was harsh and rode out on a gasp, the attempt to close his legs or deter that circular stroking going unnoticed. Nano didn't even grace him with his nostalgic voice or some damned comment gloating about just how pathetic the almighty king must look; but god, when he felt the wetness of his tongue sloping up his sore neck, he hardly cared.

He was going to regret this like nothing before; he mused bitterly about it as he opened his legs and tipped his head away from that conniving tongue. This was going to haunt him just like every other image of the man above him.

A cold hand was sliding under his pants, groping squeezing, rolling the palm of it around his aching arousal, and oh god, like he could even comprehend how dreadfully this was going to pain him after it was all said and done. He couldn't strike a fire of any sort of denial or will to oppose him, thrusting his hips in tight circles against the long and diligent fingers. They curled, squeezed around him, and very much forcefully wrenched a fervent groan out of the man beneath.

This was degrading in every form of the word.

That tongue was prodding and pushing its way into his mouth before Shiki could register it over the dizzying rush of that damned pleasure pulsing in the pit of his stomach. Fingers of the ghost's free hand were sweeping themselves up in his coal-black hair, yanking, forcing his head back at a more fitting angle for him to snare the man's lips.

And Shiki begrudgingly allowed him to, raking his fingers under Nano's clothes and biting them against the jut of the man's collar bone.

He wasn't going to hand himself over to the idol of his deep-seated malignancy without fraying the man.

Nano shifts above him in vague discomfort at the hardness of the man's fingers as he probed and shifted his tongue about the walls of Shiki's mouth, finding purchase on wrapping around the slick muscle of the other male and squeezing his hand around the hot, aching flesh between the fingers of his left hand. The small spasm of the pale hips beneath his own was as demanding as it was depraved and every bit as desperate, a perfect juxtaposition to the rage simmering behind the heavy lidded rubies stitched into Shiki's skin.

Even as Il-Re complied, ripping off Nano's clothes and pulling wickedly on the man's dampened hair, commanding what little respect or dignity he could salvage in this position; the fiery look daren't so much as flicker under the rich intensity Nano was flooding him with.

The pale hands are all over the brunette's body, ravenous, starved, scratching and pinching and sinking their fingernails into every and every crevice they can reach, and Nano bares it straight faced as can be as he slopes his palm up and down Shiki's arousal, tightening his grasp, grazing a thumb around and across the slit, delighting in the jump of the raven's sculpted form.

The ragged breath Shiki sucks in is loud, edges scuffed with the scandalous euphoria he was submerging himself in as he wrenched back, scowling, flushed in the face and trembling with the resounding ache of want.

Want. For this. For _Nano_.

That repulsed him for the most part, right down to the core of his traitorous body.

"Driven by temptation," The brunette was murmuring again, breathing against his bruised lips as he stroked the hardness between his legs with his torturously languid precision.

"Driven by secrets and fears."

Shiki had no patience to listen to Nano drawl on with his complacent muttering-not at a time like this of all times. He finds himself snatching up those sultry waves and hauling him down to press his tongue impatiently through those open lips. To hell with Nano's god damn declarations.

To hell with HIM.

Nano, for once, conceded, resuming the twisting and coiling of their tongues in a slick wrestle for power, grappling and squeezing and...

His pants slid down, dropped carelessly off the edge of the bed, and Nano's touch was sliding down to somewhere it shouldn't.

The strangled noise Shiki makes is terse, sharp, a hand darting to down to grab at Nano's wrist as a slender finger drew teasing circles at his entrance. That was something he was not prepared to take lying down, not prepared for in full and damn well not intent on letting Nano of all people change that.

Nano, on the contrary, couldn't care less about what Shiki wanted; boring into him with those dark, dangerous eyes as ground his own clothed hips into the bare, bucking ones of his outraged partner. His finger nudged insistently still at the tight rim of muscle, in a blatant disobedience to the red-raw anger flashing in those abyssal eyes.

"Don't you dare, Premier." Shiki half growls-half groans-against Nano's lips, snapping his teeth around the man's tongue as he yanked and pulled at the hand prodding intrusively between his cheeks.

Nano cants his head to one side pensively.

"No? Are you quite sure, you're in a good position to deny that?" For a fleeting second, it almost seemed the king's demand was met, the icy touch drawing away from him in an idle drag along the inside of his thigh.

Only to spread them open, push them back against the raven's quaking torso and something hot, hard, to be pressed against the cleft of his rear.

Shiki's blood runs cold.

The stretch was an unbelievable surge of blistering pain and a raw sting that choked him up to the throat, head thrown back in a strained, heavy noise of utter discomfort. Nano was dancing feverish nips and sucks on the aching skin of his neck, laid bare for the world to see, and Shiki has never felt so painfully demoralised in his life.

Nano shifted, pulling out in one treacherously slow stride, only to shove himself into the tight heat of the man in a forceful stroke, the choked, spluttering sounds erupting from the raven only serving to fuel that sick and perverse delight Nano surely was sapping out of this.

God, he was going to fucking_ end_ him for this.

But with the pulsing sensation of fullness waging full out war on the man's previously untouched body, he had no choice other than to scrape at Nano's shoulders, swallow those horrific noises he heard himself moan out, and try-try to best this twisted bastard at his own game.

He pulls the shutters down on just how much it hurts to have the man pushing, stroking against his stretched walls like this, having his thighs pushed back against his shoulders, arousal straining against his muscled stomach-and those flickering eyes mocking him every single minute of it. And it really does hurt, as he slams his elbow into Nano's temple, wrenches out of his grasp and spins to straddle the man, pushing his hands to the firm chest-but begging is beneath him even now, even when he's barely more than this man's whore, as revolting as that is to think.

He won't beg.

He will_ never_ beg.

Nano stares up at him, face as straight as it has been all night as Shiki bares his teeth and digs his fingers into the skin of the man's chest. Il-Re's hips lift, slow and not without a noticeable flicker of pain at the corners of his eyes, and drop again. His back arches in what subtlety of pleasure he can at all derive, perhaps just from being on top, showing he will never bow and never break.

Shiki smirks, and it's twisted and fractured but baring every drip of malevolence lurking under his flesh.

"I'll kill you, Premier." He hisses out on a moan as he forces his hips down against the man's arousal. His fingers claw down the pectorals of the ridiculously quiet male before him.

"_I'll god damn kill you_."

Nano says nothing, hands resting upon the toned thighs of his partner, scraping reddened, angry lines into his smooth skin, answering the matching set burning against his own, paler flesh.

Shiki is vehemently sincere in his poisonous words, and yet the jaded, boreal stare the brunette is pinning him with flares with nothing but disregard. Nothing, nothing in the wake of reducing he!-The famous Il-Re!-to little more than a hissing, groaning wreck.

His temper was fraying under the weight of that fact alone, as if everything that had transpired in this room had not been enough to drive him mad.

Damn him.

Pretentious fool.

Lightening glared across the arc of Shiki's back, across the sleek blackness of his hair and the perspiration beading along the skin as his hips moved, shifted, worked themselves against the man beneath. He wasn't going to go down without fighting to wrench the subtle, husky sounds out of this man. He wouldn't settle until he'd torn the most satisfying shriek out of Nano that he could manage, never mind the rattling, ragged breaths and hushed groans he himself was uttering when he canted his hips just right, and that inferno of bliss inflamed his veins.

The heat tightening at the pit of his stomach was unbearably close to overcoming him, the sudden jittery scratching and squeezing at his thighs that Nano made only going to validate he was not going solo in that observation.

His chest rumbled around a throaty chuckle, as hitched as his breath was and as tight as his muscles felt wound. Nano's throat clenched, eyes narrowing as the tight muscles of his arch rival worked along the throbbing arousal he pushed in rhythm to those strong, hard hips.

Il-Re was in all honesty the most beautiful and dangerous thing he'd seen to this day, with his fine body and his fiery eyes and the smooth roll of his voice. The eroticism of it all was quiet, but ferocious, a convergence of Shiki's deep, hushed murmurs of libidinousness, his rolling hips-right down to those dark, blackening bruises enveloping his neck and the sore stripes raked down his thighs.

The look on his face, jaw clenched, eyes squeezed shut, pain and pleasure caressing each handsome curve of his countenance, emblazoned itself into the backs of Nano's eyelids as the swell of heat and euphoria became too much of a burden to carry. The rush of heat enclosed around him at once with a short, breathless moan, fingers digging into Shiki's suddenly rigid hips as he released himself into the man's tight, cloying heat.

Shiki, on the contrary, was much more of a mess, bent over the brunette with a loud, howling cry of stinging ecstasy. The flush of hot liquid seared his already sore self, and the world was tumbling down about his ears as he made a wreck of himself all over his tightly muscled stomach.

The dwindling wordlessness of gasping and groaning was all that swelled in his eardrums as his racing heartbeat began to steady, and Shiki keeps his devil-red eyes squeezed as tightly shut as he can because Christ, he can't look at Premier like_ this_, he can't look at those jaded eyes and he can't look at himself in this state.

_Used_, perhaps was the word he supposed worked best.

The knife of keen-edged regret twisted itself painfully in his gut, as Nano silently pushed him off to let him sink and wither in his own self-loathing.

God knows how long it was, how long Nano had been gone or how long he'd left Shiki to lie there in a filthy mess on his own ruined sheets. His shaking hands ran through his dampened, raven tresses, pushing them back off his forehead as he glared daggers into the ceiling.

_Damn it._ Damn it all.


End file.
